A friend decided to be helpful and sent me this.

You: But then we have things like cell phones, where there are no expensive bespoke artisan goods. They are so dependent on complicated industrial processes that you can’t just hire a guy to build one to your specifications in his workshop. That’s not how they work. Me: I have no direct knowledge here, but I suspect the problem is in IP/Copyright law or security. Would it really take an industrial process to build a phone? Or could the right geek build you a custom small phone with a keyboard?

No, I think there's a huge R&D outlay in actually designing a new phone; like, when Motorola designs a new one there's a ton of effort.

The OS itself is already open-source, right? But you need a bunch of components, and you need custom firmware to run them.

Unless you're suggesting someone should, like, take a Pixel 8 and staple a keyboard to it? I'm kind of surprised that product isn't available—though again, demand is tragically low—but I don't think there are real IP obstacles to it. There are obstacles of needing to write the software for the keyboard, though. (Which I think is harder than it sounds?)

Update: apparently we're safe:

Update on April 18: Step 9 of the algorithm contains a bug, which I don’t know how to fix. See the updated version of eprint/2024/555 - Section 3.5.9 (Page 37) for details. I sincerely thank Hongxun Wu and (independently) Thomas Vidick for finding the bug today. ​    Now the claim of showing a polynomial time quantum algorithm for solving LWE with polynomial modulus-noise ratios does not hold. I leave the rest of the paper as it is (added a clarification of an operation in Step 8) as a hope that ideas like Complex Gaussian and windowed QFT may find other applications in quantum computation, or tackle LWE in other ways.

So, I am away from computer for four days for a really cool event and I come back and in the mean time they maybe found a polynomial quantum attack against Learning With Errors, a lattice problem? (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/555) If this paper is correct then this is some serious breaking news shit, because lattices are like the main candidate for quantum-secure public key cryptography. (there are others but they are much less practical and for other types there have also been attacks) I mean, this paper seems to attack just a particular setting, is very impractical and does not work for schemes that are actually proposed, but an existing impractical attack often signals the way for more practical attacks. So, if it is not a false alarm, this is pretty big. It could signal the attackability of lattice schemes and undermine the trust in them. And it takes a long time to move to a new standard. Oh well. I guess we have to wait for experts to check the paper for mistakes before we can say anything.

loving-n0t-heyting helpful of them to put that up front

Yeah I mean, a lot of dating profile stuff is putting things up front so people can judge you, right? And especially for the second I could absolutely see that being someone's kink. I hope they find the submissive guilty neurotic-left white man of their dreams. (I think?)

But it's very definitely A Thing I Read.

Excerpts from dating profiles I swiped left on:

"If you're a white man who's lucky enough to match with me, make sure to bring offerings".

"I heal my ancestral trauma by dominating white men and making them do things that improve the environment."

(These were two different profiles, seen within the space of a day or two.)

Excerpts from dating profiles I swiped left on:

"If you're a white man who's lucky enough to match with me, make sure to bring offerings".

"I heal my ancestral trauma by dominating white men and making them do things that improve the environment."

(These were two different profiles, seen within the space of a day or two.)

We're definitely doing much better than expected:

Whether we're doing "good enough"... I dunno. Like, that's mostly a continuous variable, right? Doing a little better is a little better and doing a little worse is a little worse. (Apparently the projected odds of total disaster have dropped a lot, though, which is good.)

Compared to where I thought we'd be when I first started paying attention to climate change like a decade ago, it seems like we're doing much better than expected but still nowhere near good enough, which is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs

You: But then we have things like cell phones, where there are no expensive bespoke artisan goods. They are so dependent on complicated industrial processes that you can’t just hire a guy to build one to your specifications in his workshop. That’s not how they work. Me: I have no direct knowledge here, but I suspect the problem is in IP/Copyright law or security. Would it really take an industrial process to build a phone? Or could the right geek build you a custom small phone with a keyboard?

No, I think there's a huge R&D outlay in actually designing a new phone; like, when Motorola designs a new one there's a ton of effort.

The OS itself is already open-source, right? But you need a bunch of components, and you need custom firmware to run them.

Unless you're suggesting someone should, like, take a Pixel 8 and staple a keyboard to it? I'm kind of surprised that product isn't available—though again, demand is tragically low—but I don't think there are real IP obstacles to it. There are obstacles of needing to write the software for the keyboard, though. (Which I think is harder than it sounds?)

So I have basically zero context for whatever culture war stuff we're not-engaging with here.

But this reminds me of a point that Yglesias makes a lot, which is that "tough questions" are overrated and softball questions are underrated. You get the best interviews out of asking people questions and letting them talk!

(And if the people are terrible assholes, this is even more true. You can argue with them and then they'll get defensive. Or you can sit there and ask them to tell you more about your ideas and they fucking will. This is part of what makes the infamous Isaac Chotiner interviews so devastating; he just sits there and yes-ands his subjects as they dig themselves into deeper and deeper holes.)

Arguing with your interview subjects and trying to find Big Dunks feels good, but it's not informative and it doesn't even generally make them look bad. Ask normal questions and see what they say, and if they say dumb things you can make fun of them later when they're not in the room.

I unironically want Jesse Singal to interview Brianna Wu but only ask her about the game design, production, and management of Revolution 60. That would be great.

The first thing to ask is whether she's done with the characters and the story. The character designs precede the game. They must be something she had had in her head for a long time. So is this it? Is the story told? Or is there more she wants to do with them? Could there be a sequel? A prequel?

The next thing is about the same thing, in the other direction. This was her first game, but it was also the story she had wanted to tell for a long time. What is it like to have a Big Idea and then to implement it? The conventional wisdom among indies is not to make your Big Idea into your first commercial game. If she were to do it again, would she make something smaller first? A demo? A visual novel, or a match-3 game? If she were to do it all over again, would she be able to do her Big Idea more justice?

Let's stay on this topic a bit longer. The last two questions were about art and design and creative direction. But in terms of business, is running a studio easier than plotting a story? Is it difficult to wear many hats? How can you make a successful came on the cut-throat iPad app store, how do you respond to focus groups and playtesting, when the story is Your Baby, when this is your one Big Idea?

Now Brianna Wu has gotten out of the gaming space, but this can be used to frame another question: Why? And how has gaming changed since then? Would it be harder for a woman in tech to break into the industry today compared to 2010 or 2014? Has the app store gotten worse? What about Steam? How has marketing changed? Games journalism?

Next question: Have you played Helldivers? Final Fantasy Remake? Thoughts on these? What have you played lately? How do you get your gaming news/recommendations?

Save any questions about other stuff for the next interview, or a bonus episode. It if of vital importance to not ask any culture war questions. Don't mention that time when Brianna Wu claimed to have "receipts" about Jesse Singal being a tranny chaser. Don't even push back too hard about the games auteur stuff. Just ask her about gaming, and let her talk.

Also I want Jesse Singal to write a sequel to The Quick Fix.

Surely we should use some sort of logarithm?

The rule is that it's creepy if you're dating someone whose follower count is less than half your follower count plus seven

Huh, I don't think I've seen people advertising OnlyFans on dating apps. What I've seen is full-service sex work, which honestly is probably closer to "a version of what you were looking for" but also not actually what I was looking for and therefore an annoying ad.

But the one that really annoys people the people who are advertising full-service sex work and don't make it clear in their profiles and then after you match you flirt for a bit and then they explain their pricing scheme.

Seen a few posts going around over the last few months calling complaints about people advertising their onlyfans or cam sites on dating apps whorephobic, and I think this misses the point.

I mean, some of the specific complaints have involved more thoroughgoing attacks on sex work, and I have no intention of defending those. But it also has to be said that, given that sex work is real work, a corollary is that advertising for sex work is real advertising. It seems no less reasonable to be annoyed at someone promoting their onlyfans on a site for finding romantic and sexual partners than it is to be annoyed at someone promoting a local club or trying to sell you bitcoin. At the end of the day, it's still advertising a business in a venue that's not supposed to be for that.

Can everyone just hold off on posting about FFVII remake for, like, four or five years, so I have time to get caught up, please?

Wow, if that holds up it could be a big deal.

The current paper doesn't break Kyber or Dilithium (yes, that's what the state of the art standard post-quantum encryption schemes are called), because it only works for a high modulus-to-noise ratio. But if this works it's probably improvable, so everyone should be nervous.

So, I am away from computer for four days for a really cool event and I come back and in the mean time they maybe found a polynomial quantum attack against Learning With Errors, a lattice problem? (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/555) If this paper is correct then this is some serious breaking news shit, because lattices are like the main candidate for quantum-secure public key cryptography. (there are others but they are much less practical and for other types there have also been attacks) I mean, this paper seems to attack just a particular setting, is very impractical and does not work for schemes that are actually proposed, but an existing impractical attack often signals the way for more practical attacks. So, if it is not a false alarm, this is pretty big. It could signal the attackability of lattice schemes and undermine the trust in them. And it takes a long time to move to a new standard. Oh well. I guess we have to wait for experts to check the paper for mistakes before we can say anything.

This is a common way for critiques of capitalism/markets to be dumb. (Not all critiques are dumb! But a lot of dumb critiques are dumb in this way.)

Money and profit are abstractions, but they're abstractions for something real. If something is very profitable, that usually means it's using a small amount of resources to produce something people value a lot; if something is unprofitable, that means it's using a lot of resources relative to how much people value it.

Now there are a bunch of ways this relationship can break down. There's issues of egalitarianism: richer people's desires are weighted more heavily, and something can be unprofitable even if a lot of people really want it if those people are also poor as shit. There are externalities: something can be profitable even if it uses a ton of resources, if you can find some way to avoid paying for the resources you're using.

(And of course there's a separate issue where sometimes a thing would be profitable but people don't realize it; markets aren't perfect oracles. But "isn't totally perfect" is true of any system, right?)

So yeah, there's something unfair about people not getting health care, or emergency services, or whatever, because they can't afford to pay. And that's why we have a bunch of social systems for redistributing those costs. But some amount of bad commentary is like "why don't we just give everyone all that stuff without charging?" and the "money" has to come from somewhere, because the resources have to come from somewhere. If you want to provide a fire department you need trucks and firepeople.

Another meditation on the "man dying of thirst" counter example to benefit from trade :

Imagine, I hear about all those guys dying of thirst in the desert. And I say hey, someone should do something! So I go and buy a camel and a big ol barrel of water to keep on my camel. And I wander the desert, looking for men dying of thirst, to provide them water. But I'm not independently wealthy. I need to eat. So I charge them for the water. And yknow, I don't find people very often. It's a big desert. So to support all the time I spend wandering without finding people, I need to charge quite a bit. Then, is it okay to charge a man 10k for the water to save his life? 100k? Discuss

The other option is to use a Compose key (which I found out about on tumblr like a year ago!). It's easy on Linux, apparently reasonably straightforward on Windows though you have to install a thing, and seemingly possible on Mac as well but maybe janky, I'm not sure?

I have my right Alt key set up as a compose key, so if I hold down right-alt (a.k.a. AltGr) and type an "a" followed by a "-", I get "ā".

(This also works for umlauts and a bunch of other special letters: á â á ä ą å.)

hey how are you all typing with macrons on your computers. do you just copy/paste them every time because that's what i'm doing but i dislike it.

Based on the people I follow here, it really seems like the last panel should be first.

I do in fact do this. (Side effect of studying Greek in high school.) How weird it is varies from word to word.

"Pteranodon" is fine, and so is "gnome". No one ever really notices "Xylophone". I have a lot of trouble with "mnemonic".

I pronounce the p in "psalm" but mostly not in "psychology". And I have real trouble with "Xavier", because that's a name and I should pronounce it the way the name-haver does; and they almost never pronounce the actual initial /ks/ sound.

Given that the "pter" in "archaeopteryx" is the same "pter" (Ancient Greek, wing) in "pterodactyl" shouldn't it be pronounced "archeo-ter-ix" instead of "arche-op-ter-ix"?

Eh. But then again I suppose we don't call helicopters "hel-i-co-tears".

Surely it would just be archeo-pter-ix? (Or ar-khai-o-pter-üx, but that's taking things a bit too far.)

Given that the "pter" in "archaeopteryx" is the same "pter" (Ancient Greek, wing) in "pterodactyl" shouldn't it be pronounced "archeo-ter-ix" instead of "arche-op-ter-ix"?

Eh. But then again I suppose we don't call helicopters "hel-i-co-tears".